Political Reality

Full info on https://www.patreon.com/posts/152180612

More about Seth & his work: https://www.sethmasket.com


Seth’s book Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020


Preview of Seth’s new book (coming summer 2026): The Elephants in the Room: How Trump Voters Seized the Party from Republican Leaders


Subscribe to his (excellent) Substack, Tusk


Follow him on Instagram and Bluesky (he’s @smotus most places)

Full Episode https://www.patreon.com/posts/can-we-vote-our-151099132

https://patreon.com/politicalreality

Further Reading & Resources on Voting Theory

📘 1. Kenneth Arrow's amazing 1951 book, Social Choice and Individual Values:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300179316/social-choice-and-individual-values/

a. A good writeup of the basics of the math if you don't want to buy a book:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arrows-theorem/

🧠 2. Arrow's 1950 paper introducing the idea (this paper is magnificent and you simply must read it):
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/256963

a. Non-paywalled version:
https://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/meetings/mathofranking/ref/arrow.pdf

🔄 3. A nice primer on Condorcet's Paradox:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/14-75-political-economy-and-economic-development-fall-2012/a9fd8e5ab75a325016094e6bbe625b2a_MIT14_75F12_Lec12.pdf

a. Even more on the math of voting systems:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/voting-methods/

🗳️ 4. Early work on approval voting by Steve Brams, a leading thinker on it:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/approval-voting/7CE5DEEE235794B0B12F76ADAE621482

a. Video of Brams talking about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZiS3U7EG0M

b. Uh oh! It's a video from forever ago of Andrea interviewing Brams about approval voting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAlxoW8WLX4

🏛️ 5. Some prominent advocacy groups on voting system reform:

a. Approval voting:
https://electionscience.org/

b. Ranked-choice voting:
https://fairvote.org/

🎓 6. Political science professor Lindsey Cormack speaking (admittedly briefly in these clips) about some tradeoffs around Ranked-Choice Voting (sneak preview, she'll be a guest on the show in the not-so-distant future; her instagram @howtoraiseacitizen is also a great resource on civics, politics, and current events (e.g., the SAVE act; more on that soon, too)):

a. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLGXzYVMOyX/?hl=en

b. https://www.instagram.com/p/DLPkrogss5K/?hl=en

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com

Follow Tom:


Tom Pepinsky’s website with links to his research & books: https://tompepinsky.com


Tom’s blog: https://tompepinsky.com/blog


His substack: https://tompepinsky.substack.com/

Selected books and peer-reviewed works by Tom relevant to this episode:


Recent paper on authoritarianism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2020.1775589


Recent paper on voting in authoritarian vs. democratic systems: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/voting-in-authoritarian-elections/1C066CD75F6F070930181135B288F632


Book on global challenges to democracy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-challenges-to-democracy/C50D0AC769FF0AA2C62DA9337F2C03E6


Covid paper we briefly referenced: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249596


Book based on his research on partisanship and Covid: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691218991/pandemic-politics

Selected essays by Tom relevant to this episode:


Preventing a slide into authoritarianism in the US: https://www.vox.com/politics/477317/donald-trumps-ego-democracy-authoritarianism


Crucial characteristics of fascism: https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/03/berman-on-fascism/


An absolutely fantastic “mini syllabus” on how to make sense of the Trump administration through a comparative political science lens: https://tompepinsky.com/2016/12/21/comparative-politics-and-the-trump-administration/


US’s lost leadership in East Asia: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/02/a-united-states-that-is-disintegrating-and-no-longer-a-leader-in-asia/


Life in authoritarian states: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump

Working papers by Tom relevant to this episode:


Democratic backsliding: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5363315


Biased learning from elections: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/q9zpm_v2

Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

Full Audio episode available on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/is-polarization-149962215

Full Video episode available on Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/posts/149974348


Many of the empirical trends mentioned come from the (still a favorite!) American National Election Studies dataset:


Party identity (including strength of party identity)


Affective polarization (specifically shown here as the gap between attitudes towards in-group and out-group ideologies)


Trust in government index 


Public opinion on LGBTQ laws 


Public opinion on abortion


Public opinion on government spending


The observation of “party sorting” was initially made by political scientists Morris Fiorina. It’s most extensively written about in his book Unstable Majorities, but you can read some other writings here and here.


For further reading, see also Matthew Levendusky’s book The Partisan Sort


A fantastic overview of the research on affective polarization is in this review article


An interesting example of a recent application of using affective polarization to make sense of public opinion during Covid is here (we didn’t reference it; I just think it’s cool — and it’s a preview of our guest for the next episode!).


I also wrote about all this in The Daily Beast, though I did not write the headline and would never actually sound that confident about anything.